Dive time: 00:43:00
Max depth: 38.4 metres
Temperature: 28 C
Visibility: 25 metres
Buddy: Brian, Nick
Surface interval 03:28:00
Mix: EAN 28 (MOD 38.6 metres – 1.4ppO2)

What a waste of a dive. There are really some muppet divers out there.

The Zodiacs dropped us off back at the western point of the reef to do another round of hammerhead spotting. Despite hanging around 35 metres for around 5 minutes, there was still no hammerhead in sight, and with my NDL approaching 4 minutes, I decided to swim back to the reef. In the space of 2 minutes, I managed to lose sight of Nick and Brian, so I stuck with another pair of divers to swim back to the reef. There was a bit of current so by the time I reached the reef I was breathing a littler heavier.

With still no sight of Nick and Brian, I wasn’t sure whether they would’ve surfaced to look for me or whether they would’ve just swum ahead, and in the end I assumed they did the latter so would try to catch up with them. There were a few barracuda hanging around along with schools of black and white snapper and a few hunting tuna as I cruised back up to shallower depths along the southern side of the reef. I swum at around 10 metres to conserve air.

About 28 minutes into the dive, I spotted Nick and Brian swimming back towards me, signalling that they’d hit a wall of current and had turned back around. I turned around and followed them, but Nick just powered on like a man on a mission. Brian and I swam slowly behind Nick, trying to work out what he was swimming so frantically for. Brian indicated that Nick had around 50 bar of air left and I could see Nick pulling out the SMB while still swimming along, struggling to inflate it and then shooting up to the surface.

I signalled to Brian that I was going to do my safety stop, as the Zodiac stopped to pick us up. By the time I surfaced after my safety stop, Nick and Brian had their gear on the boat and I still had 120 bar left in my tank and was wondering what the hell the rush was for. Nick didn’t even seem to realise that he had pretty much panicked and swum frantically back for no reason, and had probably chewed through his air a lot faster with his manic swimming when we could’ve just pottered around the top of the reef for another 10 minutes instead.

Ugh, what a muppet.